New Ways Ministry: Building Bridges Between the LGBT Community and the Catholic Church

Openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson penned an essay on the Washington Post’s On Faith blog in support of Maryland’s upcoming marriage equality referendum in which he made the case for the state law’s strong religious protections and exemptions.

As he argued strongly for how religious freedom will be protected, he also took the state’s Catholic bishops to task for spreading false information about this issue:

“Maryland’s Roman Catholic bishops’ caution that marriage equality ‘infringe[s] upon the religious liberties of individuals and institutions’ displays either an ignorance of what the law actually says, or an intentional distortion of the truth.”

Being a cradle Catholic and a deacon candidate who was summarily dismissed from the program in the fifth of six years of training for coming out to my wife of 39 years (who stated she always knew but I was loving & faithful as father & husband) when it finally dawned on me that I was gay, I can attest to the R.C. Churches willingness to distort the truth to their own purposes. Hardly ignorant of the meaning of the Law…they wish to dictate politically despite the diversity of public opinion. In the past, the rack and pillary would have been used. Interestingly enough I was drummed out for being gay – honest to my wife – who accepted me for appearances. I was not sexually active with men nor did I intend to be. And even odder the Program director was…shall we say…a frequent flyer in gay bath houses…my pastor – closeted. Did they care about the truth ?

Duckman, multiply your story by tens of millions, and one gets an accurate picture of our Church’s Hierarchy’s dysfunctional and dishonest approach to the issue of homosexuality, truth and ordination. The rector of our very traditional seminary summed it up, when – in the 1970’s – he told me: ”we are all that way, but only a fool adimts to it.”